


home (the farm at the end of the road)

by vagarius



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Childhood, Choking mention, Day 1 - Paper (Crossover), M/M, SouRin Week, The Ocean at the End of the Lane AU, fantasy-ish, i dont know what to tag this as but someone pulls a worm out of their shoulder, i felt like you might want to know, implied child neglect, in which no one asked for, suicide mention (unnamed character)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 13:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4837232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vagarius/pseuds/vagarius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It begins like this: a man dies on the edge of a ditch, a boy chokes on a silver coin, and Matsuoka Rin serves a glass of milk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	home (the farm at the end of the road)

**Author's Note:**

> ive been wanting to write this au for a while, then sourin week happened and i realized this was the perfect pairing for it

_"I remember my own childhood vividly... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them"_

_Maurice Sendak, in conversation with Art Spiegelman,_

_The New Yorker, September 27, 1993_

_-_

It begins like this: a man dies on the edge of a ditch, a boy chokes on a silver coin, and Matsuoka Rin serves a glass of milk.

The milk is warm, and fresh, and silky, and sooths the throat as much as it satisfies the stomach. It is served with a chunk of honeycomb, wax and all, which is sweeter than the milk but not quite as warm. And it is on this day, after waking up to the alarm clock of asphyxiation, that Yamazaki Sousuke discovers these facts.

"That's my dad's car," he says on this day, some time between pulling a coin out of his throat and being served a glass of milk. "But that's not my dad."

Rin looks up at him from his spot on the grass. Sousuke's pretty sure that's how clothes get stained. Then again, Sousuke was also pretty sure that he wouldn't find his dad's car in a ditch, and, well. Here he is. "Obviously that isn't your dad," Rin comments, as tactless as the rest of the five minutes Sousuke has known him, "Considering he's standing there, alive, talking to the police officer."

"I want my magazine," Sousuke states instead of actually responding to Rin's remark, and proceeds to walk towards the car, where his magazine sits under a dead man in the back seat. While the policeman talks to his father, he sticks his hand in the open passenger window, unlocks the car, and opens the back door. He takes the dead man's arm in his left hand, grabs the magazine with his right, and walks back up the ditch to where Rin is.

"What's he wearing?" Rin asks him as Sousuke plops down with the magazine, the prospect of stains forgotten. "They wouldn't let me see. I'm surprised they let you see."

"They didn't," Sousuke says as the most important thing, "It just happened that they also didn't notice me. I think." He pauses. "He was wearing a suit. It was very pretty."

"Don't you mean handsome? Like how grooms look at wedding when they kiss the bride?" Rin is a romantic, apparently. Sousuke keeps this in mind.

"No. I mean pretty." He really does. There's no other way to describe the dead man in the suit, with his pale face framed by his hair splayed against the dark fabric of the back seat, and his trim waist accentuated by the cut of his jacket, and the flowers that sat on his chest like memories. "Not like people pretty, though. More like beach pretty. Like laying in the sand too long."

"Have you even gone to a beach before?"

Sousuke has to think about that. He's sure he has, but he doesn't remember. "No," he answers, instead of trying to recall anything more, "But I've seen pictures."

Rin turns to look at him before speaking. "I've never gone to the beach, either," he tells Sousuke, "But I've been to the ocean. There's one in my backyard."

"Really?" Sousuke exclaims in both awe and disbelief.

"Yeah," Rin says with a smile, "I can show you."

_Okay,_ Sousuke thinks he replies, but he can't be sure. It might've only been an exhale, a flimsy breath. Nonetheless, Rin starts walking, and he follows, magazine in hand.

There's only one road connecting the Matsuoka farm to the rest of the town, running along the edge of a yellowing field, then to the left of the ditch, and against a row of houses until it opens up into the main road. It's barely wide enough for two cars to pass by each other, and winds around rather dangerously, but Sousuke thinks it's nice to walk on, if he ignores the dirt in his shoes and the dust on his socks. Rin babbles away in the background, eyes bright.

At the end of the road is the farm, and Rin, who had raced ahead the last few feet. He stands at the door of his house like a beacon, with a glass in his hand. Upon closer inspection, Sousuke realizes that it's milk.

"For you," Rin says, handing him the warm glass with a giggle. They walk inside the house, past the foyer and into the kitchen, where two people are preparing tea at the stove.

One of them turns – a young girl about Rin's age – and places a bowl of honeycomb on the table in front of Sousuke, next to where Sousuke had placed his magazine. "How was your morning?" she asks, and it takes a moment before Sousuke realizes that she's talking to him.

"I woke up choking on a coin," he responds, blunt. "How did you know I was coming?"

"I just know," the girl says, and they leave it at that.

"Did you know that a man died in the back of my dad's car?" Sousuke asks some time later, after finishing his milk and honey. The second woman had offered him tea, but he politely refused. Now he sits outside, looking out at the pond Rin claims is an ocean, alongside Rin and the girl who he still does not know the name of.

Girl-without-a-name shrugs, and quips, "He committed suicide, actually."

"Oh," Sousuke breathes, "What's suicide?"

"It means he killed himself," the girl explains, sounding incredibly uninterested in that moment.

_He must have been very sad,_ Sousuke thinks, somewhere in the back of mind, then questions, "Are you sure this is an ocean, Rin? It looks like a pond to me."

"It's most definitely an ocean," Rin declares. "Isn't it amazing?"

"Sure," Sousuke mutters, mostly to himself. _I don't believe you._

-

"Yeah, so, I think I know why you woke up choking yesterday," Rin greets him at the side of the road, halfway between Sousuke's house and the ditch.

Sousuke doesn't really care _why_ he woke up choking, in all honesty. He just doesn't want it to happen again. He doesn't want to wake up and not be able to breathe, and he doesn't want to stick his fingers down his throat to grab at some circular piece of metal, and he doesn't want his throat to be all scratched up, and he doesn't want to throw up after it's all over. But if Rin wants to tell him why, then Sousuke doesn't have the heart to tell him to stop.

"He wants to give people money," Rin says, and it makes absolutely no sense at all.

"What?" Sousuke exclaims, "Who?"

"Who do _you_ think it is?" Rin asks, in a way only a child could ask.

(He is a child, after all. Both of them are. But Rin is older, and that means out of the two of them, Sousuke is the child, technically, so he feels that Rin should be acting older even though he's not. Or something like that.)

Sousuke thinks about it, for a moment, and says, "The dead man?"

Rin smiles. Sousuke hadn't noticed it before, but one of Rin's teeth comes down to a point, and it probably shouldn't be endearing, but it is. "That's right."

"But why would a dead man give people money? And what does that have to do with me choking?"

Rin's smile dims, just a little. "Well. Uh. It's not the dead man that's giving people money, exactly. He kind of just set off a chain." Rin's smile brightens again as he adds, "And you choked on a coin, right? Can I see it?"

Sousuke would never admit to keeping the coin in his pocket, but he takes it out anyway, and puts it into Rin's waiting hands. Rin takes the coin, holds it up to his eye, and then his mouth. To Sousuke's disgust, he takes a lick at the silver of the coin, holds it to his eye again, then tosses it up into the air before letting it fall back into the palm of his hand. "It's new," he proclaims, puffing out his chest, "The date is old, but the silver is new."

"Are you telling me it just appeared in my throat?" Sousuke deadpans, even though he can't think of a better explanation.

"Yes," Rin confirms, sounding more certain than any eleven year old has the right to sound. "He was trying to give you money."

"I thought you said it wasn't the dead man," Sousuke points out.

"It's not," Rin repeats, still sounding certain, "But there's something else that's doing it. It's just easier to refer to it as he." He starts walking down the road, and Sousuke follows. "I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but my mom said that we'd need a hazel wand."

"A _what?"_ Sousuke blurts out, confused. It only reaches deaf ears, though, as Rin keeps walking towards what Sousuke now recognizes as the hazel thickets.

"Take your coin back," Rin mutters to him, before handing him the coin. Rin diverts his attention to the thicket, and pulls off one of the lower hazel branches, hanging over their heads like claws. He peels off the bark (how he does this, Sousuke doesn't know), and cuts part of the branch so the whole thing resembles the shape of a sideways イ. He holds it out in front of him, like he's holding a steering wheel, his hands gripping the legs of the イ.

"We're looking for something red." Rin explains, "And clear. It's kind of weird. Glass, maybe?"

_How are we supposed to find glass,_ Sousuke wants to voice but doesn't. Instead, he looks around the edges of the hazel thicket, where the light shines through and under the branches. A patch of light seems to twinkle, and Sousuke points at it, intrigued. "Is that it?" he wonders, mostly to himself, as Rin follows his gaze and fixes it to the light patch. His gaze shines as he trots over, muttering what seems to be elated confirmation.

The object is a pair of broken glasses; red frames loose, and lenses neatly cracked. They look a tad too bright and a bit too gaudy for Sousuke's taste, but they would look nice when worn, probably. Rin, in his curiosity, picks up the frames and puts them on, and Sousuke tries to wince discreetly. _I lied. They look horrible when worn. The color clashes with his hair. A lot._

Putting the glasses back down, Rin stands up straight, extending his hazel-wand-steering-wheel out in front of him once more. He spins in place like a sideways pinwheel, the imaginary wind pulling him this way and that. "Next thing we're looking for is blue," he says when he finally stops spinning. Sousuke's surprised that he hasn't gotten one of those migraine things his dad talks about. "It's probably stuck in the dirt."

There's dirt all around them, but nothing blue in the slightest. And Rin, despite all of his spinning, seems to be fixed in place, so Sousuke starts digging on his own. He walks down the imaginary path formed by the point of the hazel wand, and brushes away dirt as he moves. His shoe gets caught on something. He crouches down to see a small dolphin bath toy, which is in seemingly good conditions, as long as Sousuke ignores the dirt clinging to its surface. The toy is blue.

Sousuke looks up, then, to where Rin was standing before, only for his vision to be blocked by Rin himself, who now stands behind Sousuke, doing his weird pinwheel-spinning act. Sousuke wonders how he didn't notice.

The next thing they look for is yellow, and ends up being a small wooden keychain in the shape of a penguin. Maybe. It's kind of crude, with the edges dulled and the paint chipping off of it.

"What's with all these cheap children's toys," Rin mumbles, then says, louder, "Next thing we're looking for is a flood. Hold my hand." Sousuke grabs Rin's hand without hesitation. The keychain is still creeping him out. He doesn't have room in his mind to question how they would find a flood.

They walk to the forest at the edge of the Matsuoka farm. How they got to the farm, Sousuke isn't sure. As they step into the forest, they hear a soft splashing sound, and at first, Sousuke thinks it's the pond, then realizes that the sound is coming from inside the forest.

The further they walk into the forest, the more water there is. Rain falls from the clear sky, first a drizzle, then in sheets. Sousuke isn't cold, though, until a new voice starts speaking. As it speaks, the silver coin seems to freeze in his pocket. Sousuke freezes, too.

"Hello, gentlemen," the voice says, both creaky and velvet-smooth, "How may I be of assistance?"

Rin tightens his grip on the Sousuke's hand. "Name yourself," he booms in a way Sousuke's never seen or heard before.

The voice crackles. It sounds like a laugh. "My name is mine for the keeping, mister. I hope you can understand before I'm forced to show you to the exit."

"No need," Rin says calmly, his alight eyes telling otherwise. "Just tell me your name, show me your face, and leave the people of this town alone. Simple."

The voice crackles again. "You're planning to bind me, mister?" Another crackle. "How do you expect to do that?"

And suddenly, Rin starts to sing.

(Sousuke remembers, later, after he finishes pulling the worm from his shoulder, thinking that Rin wasn't particularly good at singing, or particularly bad – he was, after all, a child with an underdeveloped voice. It would've been nice to listen to, any other time, had the creature not decided to show itself in that moment.)

And in that same moment, the voice appears.

The voice, to put it simply, is a mass of torn cloth and rotting flesh, gray and old and soggy, twirling around like spaghetti on a fork, assuming that the spaghetti is made from dirty laundry and parasitic worms. Smaller masses shoot out at random intervals, smashing into trees and cutting through the sheets of rain. One of the masses speeds straight towards Sousuke. Without thinking, he catches it. Around the same time, something stabs him in the shoulder. He drops the mass in both pain and surprise, and it rolls across the wet ground in front of him. He wheezes.

Rin is gripping his hand tighter, now, and singing more frantically before he abruptly stops. The swirling mass of a voice drops to the ground, twitching, writhing, until it falls dead. They stare at it for some time longer.

"Let's go home," Rin says, leading Sousuke out of the forest.

-

Sousuke stares at his shoulder in the mirror.

There's a hole.

When he rolls his shoulder, he feels something wiggle inside. It should scare him, but it doesn't. It's just a hole.

He covers the hole with his finger for a few seconds, and when he uncovers it, he spots something small – about hole-sized – retreating back into his shoulder, away from the light.

He turns, walks toward the sink, and grabs a pair of tweezers. With the tip of his middle finger of his right hand, which is the only part of his right hand that can reach the awkward placing of the hole in his shoulder, he covers the hole once more. Holding the tweezers, he crosses his left arm over his chest, hand poised over the hole. He removes his finger and stabs at the hole in hopes of grabbing the creature inside. Luckily, he does, and starts pulling the creature out.

His wrist is in an uncomfortable position by the time the creature truly starts resisting. It hooks onto the inside of the hole, like an extra string of muscle, like it's a part of him. Sousuke climbs into the bathtub and turns on the tap.

He waits until the water is steaming before scooting back towards the stream. It burns his back and fingertips, but he's prepared. The creature is not. It starts loosening its hold in attempt to escape the heat of the water, and Sousuke oh-so-carefully pulls the creature out, bit by bit. With one final tug, the majority of the creature breaks off and dangles from the tweezers, while a small portion of the creature must still be in his shoulder. It isn't squirming anymore, though, so Sousuke figures it's okay.

Sousuke quickly throws the creature – a worm, probably – down the drain of the bathtub. He lets the water burn his back for a little longer, before standing up and turning off the tap, and closing the drain. He dries his shoulder off the best he can with his shirt, which he had taken off earlier, and places a small bandage over the hole to seal it. His pants are soaked, as well as his socks.

He doesn't feel like changing; instead, he goes to bed, wet clothes and all.

In the morning, he rolls onto the floor, sheds his pants and underwear and socks, and replaces them with clean, dry ones. Afterwards, he removes his sheets and lays them out on the carpet in hopes that they'll dry. He grabs his damp clothes from before and lays them next to the sheets. As an afterthought, he pulls on a shirt with sleeves long enough to cover his shoulders, in case anyone were to ask about the bandage.

He rolls his right shoulder. No wiggling, still. That's good.

There's a man waiting at the bottom of the stairs, standing next to his mother. It isn't his dad.

This man wears a dark gray suit with a light green undershirt. His tie is printed with flowers, and his smile is interlaced with shiny filth. He isn't pretty, not like the dead man. He isn't pretty at _all._ He isn't even handsome, or remotely approachable.

But his mother is smiling at the man like he's a memory worth keeping, and Sousuke doesn't know what to do.

So he waits. It feels warmer at the top of the stairs.

"Sousuke," his mother calls up the stairs, "Come down here and meet Hainomi-san." Hainomi-san smiles, and it looks like a crack along the bottom of his frosted-glass face. Reluctantly, Sousuke walks down the stairs.

"Nice to meet you, Hainomi-san," he greets stiffly with a bow, all while gritting his teeth in hopes of not growling, or, even worse, running back up the stairs in fear.

"He's going to be your babysitter, from now on," his mother continues, oblivious to Sousuke's uneasiness. She's still too busy smiling at the man.

Sousuke stands up from his bow, pouting. "But I've never needed a babysitter before," he points out. His mother predictably ignores the statement, waves her goodbye, and heads off for work. Hainomi-san watches her go.

"So," he says, after Sousuke's mother leaves, voice like acid down the bathroom sink, "Why don't you head back to your room, mister? I have business to attend to."

Sousuke scowls and does as he's told.

-

It feels like there's something screaming, every time Hainomi-san enters the house – something screaming _runrunrun,_ and _awayawayaway,_ in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Rin's. The screams feel more like whispers, today, and maybe that's why Sousuke listens, the whispers infinitely more terrifying than they have any right to be.

There's a pipe outside his bedroom window, about a meter to the left, and a third of the wall above his mother's flower bushes. They'd be pretty, any other time, when they weren't dying with the onset of summer heat. The leaves are brown and sad and close to rotting, as are the petals.

_I hope they're soft,_ Sousuke thinks as he leans out the open window. He brings his legs up, squats on the sill, and flings himself to the side before grabbing at the pipe. Feet against the wall, he holds onto the pipe like a rope, scaling down the wall until he loses his grip and tumbles into the bushes.

He stands. He hadn't realized it was raining. There's mud on his pants, and holes in his shirt, and his socks are soggy in his shoes. He wants to go back inside.

Instead, he runs.

For a while, he doesn't know where he's going, or where he wants to go. The dirt road flutters under his feet like ashes, and the rain moves about in tides, pushing and pulling like waves in the ocean.

_The ocean..._

A pond sits in front of him, two full moons adorning the dark surface. Sousuke's not sure when night had arrived, but it had, and with it came the shadows, which seem to be reaching towards him, closer, closer.

Rin is standing at the edge of the pond, hair plastered to the sides of his face. His eyes shine bright enough to guide boats back to shore. "Sousuke," he breathes, like the rustle of inked pages, "What are you doing here?"

Sousuke lets himself stare, for what feels like a little while, at this boy who makes _away_ feel like _home._ "I don't know," he says, and means it.

"Okay," Rin answers, then explains, "Your babysitter wants to get rid of your heart. I'm not sure why, but he sent these shadows to eat it. You should probably leave." One of the shadows tries to reach out, again, and appears to hit a wall before it can succeed. It hisses, maybe, and goes back to swaying in the dark of the night.

"Where would I go?" Sousuke asks, because he doesn't want to go back to his house, with the screams and the voice and the whispers.

"Home," Rin replies like it's easy, and maybe it is, when home is a farm at the end of the road.

"But – "

"No but's," Rin interrupts harshly. He sighs, releasing the sudden tension, and says, "Look, if he sent these shadows, that means he failed to get rid of your heart himself. You'll be fine if you just – "

It's then that one of the shadows break through the wall that seemed to be holding them, and Sousuke feels all the air leave his lungs. He's shivering. His vision is blurry, and his hearing fails him, but he can feel the arms that wrap around his torso like a blanket, and the water that swirls around his body like a friend.

He knows everything, in that moment, and feels happier than he's ever been. The arms squeeze his torso, one more time, before he finds himself sitting, perfectly dry, under the light of two full moons.

"I'll come back," Rin tells him as he disappears into the waves.

And it's there, alone at the edge of the pond Rin claimed was an ocean, that Sousuke thinks, _I believe you._

-

He drives down an old street covered in newly laid asphalt that melts into a winding dirt road that covers his tires in dust. He can't say he minds, all that much. He wonders how he was able to drive without tumbling off into the browning field to his left, or the ditch to his right. No matter.

He's not sure where he's going, at first, and it's not until he's about to turn the corner that he realizes he's at the Matsuoka farm. He's surprised it's still up.

It's then that he walks up to the house and knocks on the door. He's not expecting anyone, not really. There is someone, though, and she answers the door on the third knock. "Sousuke-kun," she says, sounding rather uninterested, like Sousuke showing up at her doorstep is a given.

"Matsuoka-san," he replies, and realizes too late that this is probably Gou, and that Matsuoka-san is probably dead and gone, but doesn't bother correcting himself. "It's nice to see you." And then, almost as an afterthought, "Is Rin back?"

"No, sweetie, I'm sorry. He hasn't been back yet." Matsuoka-san (Gou?) doesn't sound very sorry, but it's not like Sousuke minds. He didn't expect Rin to be back, not any more than he expected the Matsuoka farm to still be up, or for anyone to still be living there. "Would you like some tea?"

"Sure," he says, more as an excuse to get out of the doorway. They walk into the kitchen, where a batch of tea is already waiting, and go outside to sit by the duck pond. It's warm.

"How have you been?" Matsuoka-san asks. Sousuke is pretty sure it's Matsuoka-san, now, because he swears he saw Gou walking down the stairs earlier, and, besides, Gou wouldn't call him "sweetie" even if she were threatened at her deathbed.

"Good," Sousuke says, instead of _I was at a funeral_ and _it was much too tiring to stay_ and _I'm pretty sure my family is disappointed in me._ "Why do you ask?"

Matsuoka-san pauses. "Rin wanted to know. He asked about it in one of his letters."

"He writes?" Sousuke asks, vaguely hurt. He sent letters to Rin's new address in Australia, sometimes, in hopes that Rin would reply. Matsuoka-san must hear the hurt, though, and places a hand on his shoulder.

"His address changed, within the first month he was there," she explains. It sounds like a lie, though, but not one that's meant to hurt, or even to protect. It sounds like one that's there as a placeholder, for the real explanation doesn't make much sense. "He really loved you. I bet he misses you."

Sousuke laughs, then, though he can't for the life of him figure out why. "I miss him, too. Him and his goddamn pond." He laughs again. "What did he call it, the sea? The ocean? I think he called it the ocean."

"Yeah," Matsuoka-san says, then asks, "Did you ever make it to the beach?"

He pauses. "I think I loved him," Sousuke says, instead of answering.

(In front of them, a pond-sized ocean ripples with the smallest of waves; a greeting. Bright eyes shine through the inky blue, but only for a moment – it's there, though, and that's what matters, really.)

Sousuke blinks past a spark of red in the water, and turns away before continuing, "I don't remember."

-

 

**Author's Note:**

> " 'Lettie's going away?'
> 
> 'To Australia,' said Ginnie. 'To be with her father. We'll miss having this little fellow over to play, but, well, we'll let you know when Lettie comes back. He can come over and play, then.'
> 
> ... Australia was a long, long way away. I wondered how long it would be until she came back from Australia with her father. Years, I supposed. Australia was on the other side of the world, across the ocean..."
> 
> -The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman


End file.
